What Are You Really Eating? Wearable Camera Tracks Your Meals

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A wearable camera that hooks around the ear could become a
constant meal companion for people who want to accurately monitor
their diet.

Many fitness
trackers and exercise apps include a diet component, but all
of them require users to self-report how much they eat. That
method can lead to unreliable data, as people may forget to
report some meals, poorly estimate how much they're actually
eating or
underreport their meals on purpose.

Currently, people can "estimate diet and nutrient intake, but the
primary method is self-reporting," Edward Sazonov, a professor of
electrical and computer engineering at the University of
Alabama, said
in a statement. Sazonov is working on a new device that aims
to solve that problem. [ 7
Biggest Diet Myths ]

The device, called the Automatic Ingestion Monitor (AIM), is worn
around the ear, like a Bluetooth earpiece. On the front of the
AIM is a camera that can snap pictures of what you eat and drink.
It also has a motion sensor that sticks to your jaw, under the
earlobe, to sense movement.

The tracker ignores other jaw movements like talking and only
registers chewing and swallowing. The sensor can tell the
difference between talking and eating based on differences in jaw
movement. The total mass and energy content of the food is
calculated based on the pictures of the meals and how many times
the person chewed during a meal.

"The number of chews is proportional to ingested mass and energy
intake," Sazonov told Live Science in an email.

The image is analyzed by a nutritionist who identifies the food
and estimates portion size, but eventually Sazonov hopes to make
that process automated. A computer could calculate portion size
using 3D analysis of the images.

So far, the prototype works, and Sazonov is working on developing
a smaller and sleeker model for more testing.

Sazonov hopes the tracker will replace the unreliable
self-reported data that many doctors and nutritionists currently
rely on. He also hopes it could lead to the development of new
weight-loss strategies and help researchers learn more about
eating behaviors and
eating disorders.

There are other high-tech diet trackers like AIM under
development, including a wearable pin-on button called eButton
that constantly takes pictures and uses 3D analysis to estimate
the volume of food people consume.

But using a diet tracker like AIM or eButton could introduce an
entirely new bias into the data, said Amy Subar, a research
nutritionist at the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Control
and Population Sciences division, who was not involved with the
research. With a wearable device, people know their food intake
is being monitored, and it's likely that awareness will influence
what they choose to eat that day, Subar told Live Science.

To help avoid this bias, researchers can use the traditional
self-reporting method to get more natural data. For instance,
they can ask people what they ate the day before, when they
weren't worried about their diet being tracked, Subar said.

Subar said there are also problems with using images to catalog
the food a person is eating. Sometimes the images turn out too
dark if the person is eating in a poorly lit area like a bar.
It's also difficult to identify some foods based on a picture
alone. For example, a picture may show that a person is eating a
sandwich, but it's impossible to tell what's in the sandwich,
Subar said.

Subar said new methods like AIM mark a step forward in diet
analysis, but there are still many problems to work out. AIM will
likely first be marketed as a medical device but could eventually
become a consumer product for people who want to track their diet
with more accuracy, its creators say.